1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated circuit and a packaging method thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system in package (SIP) integrated circuit and a packaging method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, integrated circuits have been developing towards executing more functions in circuits of smaller area. In the design of system on a chip (SOC), an analog circuit, a memory, an input/output unit, and even an IR circuit must be arranged on one chip, thus significantly increase the complexity of the circuit and reduces the yield of chips.
In the design of SOC, considering that the part of the analog circuit cannot be easily achieved by a process of extremely small process device size (e.g., under 90 nm), the process of chips may be limited by the part of the analog circuit. Furthermore, in the same process, the yield of the analog circuit is also lower than that of the digital circuit. Although in a chip, the disadvantage of lower yield of the analog circuit has been gradually overcome and the size of analog device has been gradually reduced due to the progress of science and technology, the development of the analog circuit is still left far behind the development of the digital circuit which can be made to have an extremely small process device size. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a method to solve the difference in process device sizes of the analog circuit and the digital circuit. Also, in SOC, when the design is altered, the entire chip must roll off the production line again and each layer of mask must be fabricated again, thus spending a lot of time and cost in improving the circuit or researching and developing a new circuit.
Conventionally, in order to solve the above problems, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is applied to process the digital circuit, and certain devices (e.g., analog circuits, memories) are combined with the FPGA region, thereby being packaged into a system, which requires a larger cost and occupies a larger space.